


We Could Be Anything

by voiceoftreas0n



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Requested, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 00:54:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10978971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voiceoftreas0n/pseuds/voiceoftreas0n
Summary: “What’s the deal with you and Pidge?” Lance suddenly asks one day when they were alone in the training room.The question, in all its innocent curiosity, has dawned over Shiro like a slap in the face.





	We Could Be Anything

The first time Katie shows up at his door in the middle of the night, he was no closer in drifting to sleep than she was.

“Pidge?” he asks blearily, shivering at the cold as his blanket slips off him. The door shuts with a gentle hiss of air.  

“Can I stay here tonight?” she asks in response, taking a few steps closer. “I just,” she lets out a sigh that sounded an awful lot like a sob. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Without her glasses on, the tears threatening to fall from her eyes are all the more visible.

Wordlessly, Shiro lifts a side off the blanket and scoots to his left to give her space. Pidge all but dashes to his side and curls up in a fetal position facing him.

Shiro tried not to mind the inappropriateness of their position or the pounding of his own heart in an attempt to find a semblance of comfort.

“I dreamt about them,” she suddenly whispers.

Pidge didn’t have to say who they were, or what kind of dream she was having for him to understand.

 _Nightmares_ , he thought tiredly.

 _About Sam and Matt_.

That was something he knew all too well for himself.

The pounding stops altogether when Shiro feels her shaking in the space beside him.

This may not be the first time he sees her break, but the feelings from when he first witnessed it was all the same.  

His heart squeezes as he takes her in his arms.

“I’m here,” he tells her, along with other soothing nothings until she stops shaking and drifts off into sleep.

.

.

.

What he doesn’t tell her is that the first time she sleeps beside him would turn out to be the most peaceful and comforting sleep he’d have in _months._

* * *

The second time she comes is none too far from the first time she did.

.

.

.

The third, fourth and fifth times were none too different, either.

.

.

.

It soon becomes routine.  

In the dead of the night, he’d be wide awake, and she’d show up at his door.

They would say nothing as she curls up beside him.

.

.

.

In the future nights, they start to talk.

Not just about the nightmares.

Their other fears, their life on earth, this and that and everything in between until they both end up drifting to sleep.

Pidge wakes before Shiro does though, which is a mystery that astounds him as she flashes him a smile when they meet again at the breakfast table.

Other times she’d sleep in, and he would wake up with his arm possessively wrapped around her middle and his fingers tangled in her hair.

.

.

.

With every night, the fear in her eyes slowly fades away.

Pidge makes no effort to stop the arrangement.

She may have long stopped having nightmares but that didn’t mean he did.

 

* * *

 

Nights in his bed soon turn into constant contact. His arm around his shoulder when they sat beside each other, their backs pressed together during breaks squeezed between training. Little touches here and there that reminded each other that they were there, and they weren’t going anywhere, and the comfort was mutual.  

And then that was replaced with spending every waking hour together one way or another, in the hangar or in the common room.

Shiro doesn’t even know when it started, but he doesn’t tell her to stop.

Or that he secretly enjoys all of it.  

.

.

. 

Weeks later, Shiro realizes that another thing he doesn’t tell her about is the prick of disappointment in between his ribs whenever he wakes up to empty space and only the lingering smell of her on his sheets.

* * *

 “What’s the deal with you and Pidge?” Lance suddenly asks one day when they were alone in the training room.

Judging by the way he blurted the question out and the panicked flailing of Hunk’s arms, it must’ve been a question he’d held back for a long time.  

The question, in all its innocent curiosity, has dawns over Shiro like a slap in the face.

“Why do you ask?” he responds with instead.

Lance scratches the back of his neck. “I woke up early one time and saw Pidge walking out of your room like she spent the night with you.”

“Just seems like you guys do that a lot, is all.” Hunk adds, obviously carefully choosing his words.

Behind them was Keith, who, while occupied with knife work drills, was just as involved in the conversation as well with just his presence.

“We’re friends.” Shiro managed.

They weren’t friends. That was clear as day.

Friends don’t sleep in the same bed every night.

Friends don’t spend that much time with each other, or give each other lingering gazes from opposite sides of the room or do _any_ of the stuff they did, no matter how much they claimed it was normal.

Hunk and Lance were friends, the best representation of friends there was. So were Hunk and Keith. Hell, even Keith and Lance were closer to the definition of the word they were.

And by _they,_ he meant him and Pidge.

Him and _Katie_ , he mentally corrected after he remembered she gave him permission to call her that in private.

“We’re just friends,” Shiro repeated, more to himself than to his teammates. _They_ were his friends.

He’s more disbelieving of his own answer than the way Hunk and Lance look at him implies.  

He wouldn’t say she was like a sister to him because that authority was for Matt and Matt alone. Taking over the mantle would be just like saying that his good friend was gone. Neither would he say she thought of her as family either because she was still searching, still dead set on tearing the universe apart if it meant and reuniting with them once more.

So friends it is.

He and Pidge were friends.

.

.

.

_Friends who just happened to be very intimate with each other._

_._

_._

_._

Shiro barely heard Lance and Hunk’s muttered excuses as they left him to his devices in the training room.

Intimacy was normal among friends, yes.  

But how much intimacy was too much?

And did the concept of ‘too much intimacy’ even _exist_ between the two of them?

.

.

.

It didn’t.

Maybe once upon a time it did, long ago.

 _Too much_ was realized the night after Lance and Hunk talked to him with a pounding chest, ice in his spine and his hands suddenly prying off her sleeping form as if she was scalding, or maybe freezing, or maybe just something he wasn’t supposed to touch.

Someone he _can’t_ touch.

So a boundary was set with steeled nerves and repressed urges at the sight of her confused and hurt face.  

.

.

.

Little did Shiro know that the new arrangement would come with a growing ache in his chest and tingling in the lines of his palms where he usually cradled her skin against. 

.

.

.

It barely even lasted a day.

The boundary was nothing more than a line drawn in the sand, soon washed away by the crashing waves of emotions and the need to have each other close, every trace and shifted grain of sand gone as if the line had never been drawn at all.

He realizes this the first time she kisses him.

Or he kisses her.

The memory is oddly fuzzy.

But they were alone in the hangar late at night, and Pidge was working on one of Greenie’s paws for the heck of it, inputting data about the inner workings of the gentle beast into her handheld to study later.

She responded to his gentle order of _Go to sleep_ with a snorted _Later_.

So with a roll of his eyes, Shiro decided to stay and make sure she doesn’t fall asleep in the hangar again, making himself comfortable by Greenie’s ankle as Pidge worked away.

The setting wasn’t anything special or significant if he had to be brutally honest.

There is no victory to celebrate or a final battle that awaits. He is not gasping his dying breaths nor rendered helpless by injury and neither was she. There were no tearful goodbyes or relieved hellos, no long, drawn out confessions or awkwardly stuttered admittances of feelings.   

Just the bristling awareness of her, the way her screen lit against her glasses and made her eyes look like molten sunlight, the soft timbre of her voice as she talked mostly to herself about her procedures, and everything else in between.

Just the two of them, a boundary so easy to break and the overwhelming desire to kiss her that moment.   

And so he does.

And when she meets him halfway, he knows that she must’ve thought the same way.

* * *

 That kiss may have been their first, but it certainly wasn’t the last.

* * *

Keith has noticed.

One may chalk up most of the Red Paladin’s expressions to be an omnipresent scowl or monotonous along with his clipped tones and snappy sense of humor, but Shiro knows him like the back of his hand.

While the slight raise of Keith’s brow is barely noticed by most, Shiro immediately spots it.

Especially when it was directed at him as he sits in the common room’s plush white seats, Pidge with her head in his lap and his fingers gently playing with the strands of her hair as she typed away on her console.

Keith doesn’t say anything, which is something he always did.

But his eyes told Shiro everything.

.

.

.

 _Just friends, my ass, Shiro_.

.

.

.

Keith suddenly smirks, and Shiro suddenly feels uncomfortably warm in his own skin.    

* * *

They weren’t friends.

The status of relationship was not out of hostility, not out of rank or respect or pseudo-familial bonds that transcend friendship.    

They weren’t friends because they weren’t _just_ friends.

They weren’t friends because they were so _much more_.

And now as she stares at her sleeping form and wraps an arm around her he _knows_.

One day they’ll know exactly where they stand.

One day they’ll be able to face their friends with a clear answer of what they were.

.

.

.

But that day has to wait.

.

.

.

“Shiro?” Katie calls blearily in her sleep.

He all but hums in response.

“Go to sleep.” She mumbles against the crook of his neck, snuggling her nose into the skin there.

Shiro smiles as he pulls her closer and complies.

**Author's Note:**

> Titled derived from Friends by Ed Sheeran.  
> Requested by an anon on tumblr for the shuffle song fic request. Also this was unbeta'd so please forgive any inconsistencies? 
> 
> Follow me on [tumblr](hearmyvoiceoftreason.tumblr.com)?


End file.
